As Marcellus said in “Hamlet” to Horatio: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

I’m done with Denmark - again. Whatever they export other than the danish and pig, I am boycotting.
At a zoo in Odense, Denmark’s third largest city, zoo staff dissected a nine-month-old lion cub in front of an audience of “enthralled” young children.

“The cub was killed in February because her genes were already common in Europe, and she might have weakened the gene pool if she had gone on to breed,” wrote the Reuters news wire.

Wouldn’t it have been better to gift the cub to another zoo in another country where they didn’t care that much about the gene pool? There, she could have lived a good, long life and be admired by thousands of zoo visitors.

“It smelled really bad, but it was exciting to see what the lion looks like inside. It’s cool that it was so similar to a human,” said 11-year-old Sofie Beyer, one of the many children invited to the zoo to witness the dissection.

I’m just trying to think of why dissecting a cub lion would be beneficial for children to watch? I’d feel sorry for the poor thing, who died because someone decided that it didn’t fit the gene pool. Someone in the 1930s also was thinking like this - about humans (and spoke German).

A staff member gave running commentary during the event and defended it as a way for children to “learn the realities of life and death.”

The reality is that the healthy cub was alive until they killed it for a morbid reason, and now it is dead.
The zoo is really “teaching those kids watching the dissection to foster a callousness toward animals later on in life,” wrote one protester on social media.

“A member of the public supporting the cub’s killing noted that the only children who were traumatized were the ones who did not get seats for the event,” Reuters wrote.

Really? These must have been some sought-after tickets.

“Look what I got for you, Johnny. Tickets for the zoo. Not just any tickets, but to see the dissection of a cute little cub lion.”

Remember ‘Marius,’ an 18-month-old giraffe, who also made the news in a Copenhagen zoo, and for similar reasons?

He was slaughtered to prevent in-breeding and was dissected as the public, including children, watched, and then Marius was fed to the lions.

This was after zoos and wildlife groups around the world begged for the young harmless animal to be spared and offered to place him in a safe home elsewhere.

Petitions were also circulated among wildlife groups and animal lovers to protest the zoo’s plans for the cub. But it seems it is all to no avail when it comes to the Danes.

What next? “Danish zoo tortures little bunnies in front of kids,” may be next year’s headline.

So, until they repent, no more danishes for us, or holiday cookies, Danish ham, or anything else that country makes. And no more tourism dollars for them either, until they agree to stop killing their zoo animals.